Something that has mattered in my life is a “to and from.” Going to Edisto Island, South Carolina and coming home from that family vacation, then planning to go again. We leave Pittsburgh when the morning is black and fog-wispy. We place coffees in the cup holders, hands bump the navigation screen plotting our day’s course. It will take 10 hours without stops. We will have to stop. But in the beginning, our ETA feels superlatively achievable. On the map app, the blue line traces from Pennsylvania through Fayetteville, WV, to Charlotte, NC, veers left at Columbia, SC, braves I-95 for 45 minutes, navigates the coastal estuaries beyond Walterboro, SC, and hops over the McKinley Washington Jr. bridge for SC Hwy 174 Edisto Island. The blue line dead-ends in the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
We follow that line to and from. A migration.
Grocery Lines
We arrive on Edisto Island and stop at the Bi-Lo grocery store. Grocery carts rust in the salt air. From the parking lot, we look over the wooden fence, beyond the BP gas station to the blue yonder, catch a line of sand. Pelicans surf a horizontal air current, forming an avian strand of the fairy lights my children drape on our Christmas tree.
I creep the aisles of Bi-Lo, a shameless spy of the other carts. What vacation necessities make the lists?
Pimento cheese. Margarita mix. Eggs. Bananas. Grits.
In normal times of Bi-Lo life, the checkout lanes are not optimized for typical beach bodies squished between the gum and magazines, the energy shots and hair ties. Now, the six-feet distancing of 2020 compresses to three-feet in Bi-Lo. Cart wheels scuff heels. The grocery line crawls forward.
Spaghetti sauce. Blue Bell half gallon ice cream. Frozen french fries. Cornbread mix.
Church Pew Lines
The pews at Trinity Episcopal Church are 144 years old. The incense of prayers saturates the wood. From the rippled glass windows, I spy live oaks dripping Spanish moss, curlicues reclining downward to graves planted below.
Next to the hymnal rack, someone has etched letters. J.W. and W.W. The letters’ lines are darkened by polish and possibly the oil of fingers tracing. Do these letters represent names? How exactly does one carve graffiti in the reverence of a sea island church without drawing attention? A little pen scratch here…wait until the Prayers of the People rise in volume…then a longer scratch there? The letters are testimony of lives outlived by lines.
Sunscreen. AA Batteries. Bug spray. Boar’s Head ham slices. Mustard.
Horseshoe Crab Lines
An early morning beach run pays off in discovering tracks in the sand, beginning at the ocean edge, wandering into sea oats on the dunes. The scuttle marks do loop-di-loops. At the track’s dead-end, I find a horseshoe crab. 25 yards down the beach, another track. Another crab. I begin to worry. The tide is receding. The crabs seem beached. Perhaps drunk, given the staggering way they loop away from the water.
I want to offer rescue, but these prehistoric beings unnerve me. The smooth-domed basketball shell that horseshoe crabs present to the upper world conceals a darker underworld: a Dante-esque maw of clicking, scrabbling legs. Their closest relatives are actually spiders and scorpions. Some Google research further informs me these crabs have exited the water in order to mate. They will return to the water. They do not require rescue. I have simply caught them in the moment that loop-di-loops between to and from.
Benne wafers. Parsley. Olives. JIF Peanut Butter (smooth not chunky). Sunglasses.
Pelican Lines
We count flying pelicans lined up behind a leader. At times there are 30. Often 70. We’ve tallied over 100. These gangly birds with shrivel pouch necks strike an unimaginably graceful line in the sky. In alignment, pelicans are precise and responsive. When diving for fish, the pelican’s rotund body somehow morphs into a blade slicing the water; catching me unaware, I’ll panic “shark” before the bird bobs to the surface ballooned again like the ocean’s rubber ducky bath toy that it is.
Pickles. Hot dog buns. Bacon, the non-turkey kind. Duke’s mayonnaise.
Gravestone Lines
In the sepulchral jungle that is the Unitarian Church graveyard in Charleston, SC, a certain grave dates back to 1896. A crepe myrtle tree hugs the stone, knobs of trunk bubbling around it like a fossilized slime experiment my daughters conduct and then forget in our basement.
The gravestone is “Sacred to the memory of Ephraim Seabrook Mikell.”
The lines etched in the stone explain this man died on May 5, 1896 “after a short illness.” The stone carver chiseled another line: “A favorite with all who knew him.”
Whatever short illness it was that took Ephraim Seabrook Mikell from this earth, no matter how hard the earth has tried (for 124 years and counting) to reclaim stone with wood, the lines on Ephraim’s grave preserve the joy infected on anyone lucky enough to know him. Could a lifeline dead-end anywhere better than “A favorite with all who knew him”?
Chicken necks. Orange juice. DiGiorno’s freezer pizza. Self-rising flour. Red Clay hot sauce.
Loggerhead Turtle Lines
Loggerhead sea turtles migrate. They are born. They crawl to the ocean. They undertake multiyear, epic loops at sea. A new study suggests turtles follow the Earth’s magnetic field back to their birth-beach to mate, lay eggs, and go to and from all over again.
If I wake early enough to catch dawn rising over Edisto Beach, I may find loggerhead mama tracks. At first glance, I assume a golf cart has driven in and out of the ocean.
If I walk Edisto Beach at sunset, I may find the Turtle Conservation Patrol. These volunteers who inventory hatched nests dig for survivors too weak to join the first hundred hatchlings scrabbling from beach to ocean. With gentle sifting and cheers from gathered vacationers, these laggard babies can flip-flop oceanward, drawn by the magnet of water, to join the multiyear, epic migration. Their ultimate chances of survival are negligible. Yet I hope against any statistical hope that each rescued baby’s story will have a to and a from.
Beer: cheap in boxes or local brewery in six packs. Hard cider. Australian Malbec flashed on sale, two for one.
Ocean Sand Lines
The ocean draws lines in the sand that get erased in twelve-hours’ tide-time, never to be duplicated or seen again. The ocean cannot revise. It can only try again from scratch. It does not redact mistakes but rather performs miracles over and over again. Draw. Erase. Draw. Erase. Fleetingly, I stand witness to the ocean’s lacework.
It seems a sad waste to have the lines irrevocably erased. And yet to stop the to and from of the waves would erase the purpose of the ocean itself. There must always be another line to be drawn in the sand.
Pecans. Black eyed peas. Taco shells. Honey Nut Cheerios. Collard greens. Pickled okra.
Map Lines, Again
My map line from Pittsburgh to Edisto Island must continue to go to and from. If a sea turtle takes two to four years to circum-migrate ocean currents before returning to the spawn point, I can relax into the current, trusting a retracing, rather than an erasing, of my to and from.
Grave stone lines, literally carved in stone, seem so final. Human names reduced to lines grafittied in wood. Do these lines stop? Or do they carry onward because I am there to observe? To spy on what people have piled into their grocery carts? Lines that started in a church pew, queued at a grocery store, and ended in a graveyard intersect a trajectory of my life. Could these lines, perhaps, with purpose, someday loop back as “A favorite to all who knew her?”
I will continue returning to Edisto Island in hopes of finding this answer. A purposeful flux, to and from.
Thank you for so beautifully sharing memories that call me too, the “to and from’.